Petite Anglaise

There is a minute sub-genre of chick lit that I like very much. Let's call it "how to be French". Everyone should want to be French I think, and happily there are a number of authors who feel the same way.

So. We loved Entre Nous - about releasing the inner French girl, and How To Be Impossibly French with loads of quotes and advice from Ines de la Fressange and others. There are books on the French by Edith Wharton and of course Gertrude Stein, too, but let's not get too serious about this. The books on "how to dress like a French woman" are almost universally disappointing and outdated. This is a very, very mini sub-genre as I mentioned.

The newest recruit, currently clocking at something like 200,000th on the Amazon best seller list, is Petite Anglaise, about a British woman and Francophile, moves to Paris, has a baby whom she calls Tadpole, and lives with a husband she names Mr. Frog. Not very nice, that Froggy bit but it's her call.

I should love this book, which is both memoir and a brief history of blogging. The author, Catherine Sanderson, started a blog about being an English girl in Paris a long time ago, (well, long in terms of online if not world history) it took off like wildfire, she rolled the experience into this book.

The memoir is also about how to lose a husband by blogging.

Sadly Catherine is as annoying as the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love.

The mini genre emerging in chick lit is, then, something along the lines of "how self absorbed can I be without you realizing it and throwing the book against the wall?" Or, hitting "close" on the blog -- I went to the source the other day and read the latest entries on http://www.petiteanglaise.com/ where Catherine gets accolades from dozens of commentators on her daughter Tadpole's prowess with a Sharpie, on how clever/cute is the kid, on how lovely life sounds with The Boy (the new man, after Mr. Frog was dispatched) and so on. I guess this is blogging at its best -- the minutiae of the quotidien which we can all relate to and admire. Certainly Catherine admires her own self and what a good mommy she is. Why, she feels really BAD when Tadpole is going off to the grandparents, and is charmed when Tadpole says "it's okay mommy, you'll have The Boy to play with."

Dear god.

But, art follows life follows art.

A good friend of mine recently found himself at a dinner party, seated next to a young woman with a couple of kids. He didn't realize that said mom was an executive VP/creative director of a huge, multi-billion-dollar empire. And why would he know that? All the talk at the dinner table was of the vacation just taken or the vacation about to be taken; plus kids. In fact, the woman didn't become animated or engaged until my friend in desperation launched a question of his own: "So, with the children, the birthdays, uhm, do you give presents to ALL the kids or just the birthday child?"

I'm not saying that this woman needed to talk about work. I am suggesting that being where she is in life, coming from a family of astute art collectors and philanthropists, and being an industry leader, there might have been something......interesting...... to offer a conversation.

It is me who is out of synch, obviously. Catherine's blog is very, very popular and you, my friends, are rare.

Ah, maybe this is all too harsh. Is it deep and profound to love to read books about being something you are not? Hardly.

Though every book, in its way, offers at least the possibility of emerging, after the last page, as something you were not. Something better.

A book or a blog that is really and truly just about me the glorious me me just as I am me me me stands as a failure of imagination. Cute as you and your kid may be.